How better to welcome everyone back from Labor Day than with this Tom Toro panel?I drove 275 miles each way Saturday to visit my mother for her 100th, though her birthday was actually Sunday. As it happened, the 550-mile round-trip wasn’t so bad and I assume most drivers had left on Friday and returned yesterday, […]
Douglas Rodger saluted American workers with this Labor Day cartoon in the San Francisco News a century ago, but, in Chicago, my grandmother was involved in a different sort of labor, and I am rising to a point of personal privilege today.In those days, fathers were banished to the waiting room, and so in a […]
I wish I could believe in Paul Fell’s vision of a world in which labor unions had the upper hand on management. He’s got a point in that the falling unemployment rate gives workers a degree of leverage they haven’t enjoyed in quite a while, and it’s also true that there has been a jump […]
An odd piece today from Prickly City (AMS), where the meaning of Labor Day, and of holidays, has apparently disappeared entirely.Well, perhaps not so odd, given that we’ve largely stopped honoring holidays in this country. We’ve not only got fewer holidays than many other countries, but we only take a handful of them as holidays […]
Daddy’s Home (Creators) puts me in mind of “The Archie Bunker Rule” that I had in our household when the boys were in junior and senior high.The rule stated that “Nobody who would not be welcome through the door is welcome through the television.”I realize I hold a (heh) minority opinion by feeling disquieted by […]
Signe Wilkinson provides nearly the only Labor Day cartoon I was able to find this morning.Her lament over the lack of jobs is an implicit criticism of the current administration, but I like the fact that she focuses on the economic displacement caused by the pandemic and the plight of workers.It’s certainly not hard to […]
Mo points out that those who serve and wait rarely get a chance to stand, and there are indeed people working Labor Day and, I hope, still plenty of people who aren’t.Here’s my rant on the topic, worth saying, worth reading, but not worth repeating as often as it becomes relevant.When I first lived on […]
If Australia were not on the other side of the globe, this would be the first day of Autumn there. As it is, it’s the first day of Spring and their first day of Autumn will be March 1.Point being that, while I’m all in favor of knowing about the equinoces (well, it should be […]
Non Sequitur leads us off with this concise history of Labor Day and how it almost worked and then pretty much fell apart, though he applies the principle that history is written by the victors, so it seems, on the surface, to have a happy ending.I blame George Westinghouse, the son of a bitch who […]
One of these women is turning 94 today and the other is my great-granddaughter and thus her great-great-grandaughter.So, in honor of the occasion, here are some cartoons my grandfather might have read in the newspaper when he wasn’t pacing the floor on September 1, 1924, which is what expectant fathers did in those days.(Editor’s note: […]
Amid the flood of Back-to-School cartoons that didn’t make me laugh, Baby Blues evokes a memory of parenting that did.Granted, it wasn’t over math, since my boys were both better at math than I was and the teaching of math is far superior than it was in my day. Those factors are probably related, but […]